He took several wives but loved none of them, enjoying only the feel of their bodies and their subservience to his will.

He grew into a feared warrior. Rival villages fell. One of the villages, to ward off an attack and ensure peace, offered him their loveliest woman as a wife: Mariama.

Oh, Mariama.

He fell in love with her, cherished her as he had never cherished a woman before. Their souls bonded, and they became as one. She smoothed the edges of his hard heart, and calmed his desire to dominate. Unknowingly, by coaxing him to become a gentle man, she caused the erosion of his skills in battle, too.

An upstart village attached them, and both he and Mariama were captured. They were sold to the pale men, the European slave traders.

He and Mariama were separated, savagely. As if they were only cattle.

He was shattered. He vowed that, one day, he would see her again, no matter how long it took to find her.

He survived an overseas voyage on a stinking, rat-infested ship, packed so tightly with other slaves that even another man's wastes would seep down his legs and back. As he lay in the cramped s.p.a.ce, his body sore and filthy, his stomach aching with hunger, he made another vow: he would not live his life as anyone's slave, and they would not kill him, either. He would kill them first. It was not his destiny to serve as a slave. It was his destiny to be served by slaves.

When the ship arrived at its port, he was sold to a wealthy planter in the state of Virginia. It was a strange new world. No one knew who he was. No one knew his greatness, his prowess in battle. They did not fear him, as they should. They treated him as if he were a common mule.

He did not see Mariama at his new home.

He submitted to the harsh life of a slave, biding his time. Many times, his rage overwhelmed him, and he lashed out against the overseers. Always, they beat him with merciless glee.

Sometimes, his fellow slaves spoke in hushed tones about escaping. Usually, when they tried, they were captured and brought back to the plantation-or they were killed. He understood that there would be a better way for him. He was a great man, with a destiny to fulfill. Running fearfully through the night was not his path.

Freedom came once he finally killed.

He saw an overseer whipping a young female slave. He seized the man and broke him over his knee, like a plank of wood.

The act demanded that he be put to death, immediately. But he was saved, by the destiny for which he'd awaited: Lisha.

The mysterious black female, feared even by the white men, arrived on the plantation, and intervened to purchase him at a high price. She took him away.

She said that she had been watching him. She offered him a life free from death, a life of timeless power. The life of a vampire.

He accepted without hesitation, recognizing that the power of which she spoke was his destiny. He became Lisha's companion.

They moved to the colorful, vibrant city of New Orleans. There, they lived in a mansion, with servants eager to fulfill their every whim. At night, they left the confines of the estate to satisfy their bloodthirst on the humans.

On one of their hunts, he found Mariama.

He had known that he would find her again. She was as beautiful as he had remembered, in spite of the hardships she'd endured since their separation.

She was a slave for a rich white man. He'd invaded the house, to feed on the inhabitants, and found her asleep. Stunned, he promised to take her away from the place, so she could live with him. Although Lisha had saved him, he would have freely left Lisha to be with Mariama again.

But Mariama barely recognized him. She thought he was a demon. As he tried to convince her that he was indeed her husband, men broke inside, bearing rifles. They fired. He avoided the gunfire. Mariama did not.

Believing that she was dead and lost to him forever, he fled, weeping, to Lisha.

She comforted him, though he wept for a woman. She understood that he loved Mariama more than he could ever love her. She did not seem to care. She only wanted his companionship.

But he wanted more.

He wanted to destroy these men who had caused such pain and torment. He wanted to destroy those who submissively accepted pain. He wanted to wipe all of them clean from the earth. He wanted to drench the world in their blood.

He did not join Lisha on the next night's hunt. He left her.

He began to build his army, to help him fulfill his mission, his true destiny.

With a horde of vampire warriors behind him, he went on a b.l.o.o.d.y rampage across the land. Plantations fell, much like the rival villages had in his days as a man. He squashed them under his heels and washed himself in their blood.

And incredibly, he found Mariama again.

She walked with a limp, from the gunshot wound, but she was no less beautiful to him. She had been placed on another plantation, and worked inside the master's house.

She recognized him with the same glimmer of fear in her eyes. She said he was not a man. He said she was correct. He was better than a man. And he was going to make her better than a woman, too.

He destroyed the plantation and took her with him. He planned to make her a vampire, once he had the opportunity to complete the secret rituals that Lisha had taught him.

But the very next day, tragedy struck.

This time, Mariama did not survive ...

Roaring, Diallo punched the lake's shimmering red sur face. The blood splashed, and the haunting memories rippled away.

He ran away from the banks, into the crimson forest. He ran and ran.

Then, the woods thinned. He ventured out of the shadows, and into a gleaming red meadow.

He looked up. The sun was a blood blister. The sky was a raw membrane. The mountains on the horizon were giant hunks of bleeding flesh, the trees had been dipped in gore, and the gra.s.s did not crunch underfoot; it oozed, as though he tread across a vast carpet woven from threads of dripping skin.

He had created this place ...

Chapter 7.

-uesday afternoon, David visited one of his father's lesser- known properties: a log cabin located in the forested hills on the edge of the town. Earvin Williams, his dad's estate attorney, had told him about the place. "Your father used to go there when he wanted complete privacy," Earvin had said, then added with a smile, "By the way, it now belongs to you, too"

He hoped he would learn more about his father by visiting the cabin. Since Sunday's revelations, he had not discovered anything noteworthy. His father kept thousands of books, hundreds of photos, and boxes full of papers dispersed throughout the house, in no discernible order. It would take time and energy to dig through everything and piece together the puzzle of Richard Hunter's life.

He followed the directions the lawyer had given him to reach the hideaway. He drove on a quiet, tree-shaded road, away from the residential areas. Ahead, the route hit a dead end, but there was a driveway on the right, between a row of shrubs. He turned onto the winding lane, and into the forest. King perched on the pa.s.senger seat, looking curiously at the dense woods.

"You won't ever roam out there, pal," David said, stroking the dog's neck. "You'd never find your way home"

The dog chuffed, as if he disagreed.

The cabin stood in a clearing, perhaps a quarter of a mile down the road. King, always eager to explore new places, beat him to the door.

Inside, the air was warm and stale. It was a s.p.a.cious, oneroom house with a high ceiling. A kitchenette occupied one side, a bedroom area, the other, and the living s.p.a.ce was in front. The bathroom was barely larger than a closet. A desk stood along the far wall. It held a lamp, a jar of pencils, and an old typewriter.

As King sniffed his way through the cabin, David looked around, too. After fifteen minutes of searching, and finding nothing whatsoever of interest, he was ready to leave.

His cell phone chirped. It was his mother.

"How are things in Mississippi?" Mom asked. "I haven't heard from you lately, boy. You've moved there and forgotten about me"

"Hey, Mom. I've been fine, still getting settled, mainly."

Although he normally shared almost everything with his mother, he decided to keep quiet about his investigation. Mom didn't want him there to begin with, and the last thing he wanted to do was upset her with the few discoveries and theories he'd learned so far. She would only insist on him coming back to Atlanta.

Instead, he told her about Nia. He gushed about Nia, actually. He hadn't told anyone in his family about her yet, and the praises flooded out of him. Mom, of course, was glad to hear about her. David knew that she privately nursed a wish that he would settle down soon and start a family. "You'll be thirty next year," she'd begun saying lately. "I don't want to rush you into anything, but you want to have your own kids while you're young enough to enjoy them. You don't want to be a sixty-year-old man out there getting winded trying to play ball with your teenage son" Whenever David countered by telling her that meeting the right woman was hardly a simple task, she accused him of being a workaholic who didn't socialize enough. He could never win.

"Well, it's so nice to hear that you've finally met a nice young lady," Mom said, and he could hear the smile in her voice. "Treat that girl right. A good woman's hard to find."

"You know I'll treat her right, Mom. I had a good teacher in you, didn't I?"

"You sure did." Mom laughed. "I love you"

"Love you, too. Bye"

Hands on his waist, David looked around the cabin one last time. He hadn't found anything useful, but at least he could come there if he wanted some privacy. In fact, it might make a nice weekend getaway with Nia, he thought with a smile.

Outside, he found a gigantic black bird standing atop the Pathfinder's hood. It looked like a crow, though an unusually large one.

"Shoo, birdie," he said. He waved his hand.

The bird did not move. It stared at him with beady, inkblack eyes. It looked directly at him without faltering.

It was not a crow, he realized; it was much too big for that. It was a raven.

"Hey, fly away now," he said.

Behind David, King growled deep in his throat.

The raven ignored the dog. Still watching David, it ruffled its wings.

David took a step backward. Crazily, memories of that Alfred Hitchc.o.c.k flick, The Birds, came to mind.

The bird cawed. It launched itself into the air, swooping right above David he felt a wave of cool wind as it flapped its broad wings. The creature soared away into the blue sky.

David frowned. Weird. He'd never seen a bird behave so boldly.

King watched the raven vanish into the sky, and then looked at David.

David shrugged. "Nope, pal. I don't know what that was all about, either."

Wednesday night, David slept fitfully. He was plagued by a nightmare of his father.

In the dream, he stood over his father's grave, paying his respects. The ground began to tremble and heave, like the deck of a boat caught in a sea storm. Then the grave burst open, spewing raw earth in pungent clumps, and his father climbed out of the ragged hole. He wore a dark suit and did not appear to have decomposed at all. He looked robust and healthy. He sprang to his feet and seized David by his shirt, and said, "Death is invigorating, son. You should try it sometime ... "

David jumped awake with a scream trapped in his throat.

"Only a dream," David muttered. He was panting. "It's over."

Silent darkness draped the master bedroom. The digital clock on the nightstand read 3:06. He had climbed in bed only three hours ago, after talking on the phone with Nia. They were going to see each other again on Friday. He had invited her to dinner at his house.

He wished she were with him tonight.

He was too shaken up to immediately go back to sleep. He swung his legs over the side of the bed, and his feet brushed across King's flank. The dog snored softly. King was a deep sleeper.

"Lot of good you are, mutt," David said. "Someone could've been choking me and you'd be snoring."

He stepped around the canine, grabbed his house robe from the hook on the door, and shuffled out of the bedroom.

He decided to surf the Web until he became too exhausted to keep his eyes open. But first, he went downstairs to the kitchen to get a drink. His mouth was as dry as if he had been chewing cotton b.a.l.l.s.

Standing beside the counter, he gulped an entire bottle of cold water. Better.

He was walking across the hallway, back toward the staircase, when he heard a creaking sound coming from the living room, just ahead.

He thought of dismissing it as one of those ordinary settling noises that old houses tended to make. But this noise did not fade away. It continued, rhythmically.

It sounded like someone was sitting in the rocking chair.

Cool sweat beaded on the nape of his neck. The darkness in the hallway, relieved only by the dim range light in the kitchen at the end of the hall, pressed in on him like thick walls.

He sucked in a deep breath.

Although he didn't want to go near the living room, he had to look. He had to pa.s.s by the room to reach the staircase, anyway.

But most important, he had to see who was in the rocking chair.

What if it was his father?

In the blackness of night, the thought did not seem farfetched at all.

Lifting his feet to walk required a herculean effort; it was as though he wore lead weights strapped to each foot. He trudged to the living room doorway. He looked inside.

Moonbeams coming through the window cast a pale glow across the room, and in that milky luminescence, David saw a man sitting in the rocking chair. An older man. The man wore a crisp white shirt, bow tie, suspenders, and dark slacks. Wire-rim gla.s.ses gleamed on his face, and David made out a pipe nestled between the man's lips.

It looked exactly like his grandfather, John Hunter, or "Big Daddy" as everyone called him.

But Big Daddy had been dead for twenty years.

Big Daddy rocked, rocked, and rocked in the chair. He faced David.